About Us
“Everybody thinks their life is weird. Most of us are right.” — Anna Gát
Welcome to Interintellect, a new cultural institution dedicated to the highest quality conversations every day, for everyone. We are a platform for public, apolitical discussions about the world’s most important topics and also offer a cozy members-only tier for freebies and extras. We welcome the world’s curious to attend and host salons and salon series. Whether your passion is history, technology, philosophy, economics, or the arts — or maybe all of these — you have arrived at the place to find the best conversations about it.
Intellectual Orphans
Interintellect started with the viral essay “We’re a Niche, We Just Didn’t Know” in 2019 by founder and CEO Anna Gát, a philosopher and technologist. Anna’s essay celebrated how the first fully internet native generation is reinventing discovery, finding its “tribe”, and building new communities online and offline. The old “intellectual” was dead, and the new ones were being born every day on blogs and in salons, in group chats and on Discord servers. Anna decided to build an organization for them to hang out, build their communities, and learn together.
A World of Ideas
Interintellect runs on the fuel of intellectual openness: our attendees, community tier members, and event hosts join us online from all over the world, or host in-person gatherings in the cities where they live. We believe in “culture peace” over culture war, and trust our hosts and salon participants who might come from any political side to enjoy complicated, enlightening discussions together.
Together, in our friendly and curious conversation spaces, we examine the great questions of literature and technology, philosophy and psychology, history and economics, every day, in numerous time zones.
Passionate Living
In a world where everything has to be optimized, having a space where the goal is simply togetherness and discovery is crucial. We like to say that the goal of a salon is itself — we are not here to “network” or show off, but to enjoy each other’s company and ideas.
Throughout the years, Interintellect attendees, community tier members, and hosts have of course found co-founders and co-authors at salons, landed their next job, or even met their future spouses and had beautiful children together. But our salons come with no agenda, whether political or professional. We exist so you can think in peace, and enjoy being yourself.
The Value of Thought
Developing a healthy, enriching intellectual life is as important to humans as having a good professional or family life. Interintellect’s mission is to make such a life available to all who need support, challenge, and community in order to achieve it. And we build tools to enable the ambitious up and comers to be able to earn a living hosting the conversations they want to see in the world.
From the earliest days, we have strived to ensure anyone — regardless of location or official job title and academic rank — can host Interintellect salons, and make money doing so, supporting public thinker careers via ticket revenue, tipping, host training, and a lively and helpful community of peers.
Whether you’re a blogger, a podcaster, a private enthusiast, or an academic looking for a wider audience, hosting Interintellect salons is a wonderful way of growing your profile as an intellectual.
A Space of Humans
Interintellect exists because human conversation can’t be replaced. We use AI internally, explore AI-assisted communication tools, and encourage our hosts to use it for research, but the salons themselves are about something AI can’t really give you: being in a room, offline or virtual, with people who showed up to think with you.
We are conscious of the immense role of human collaboration in independent thinking, and of our growing responsibility for providing spaces where people can be people, where we can be together in friendship the way only humans can.
